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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

Seminars and reading groups in Lent Term 2026

 

Departmental Seminars

Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3.30pm to 5pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre.

Organised by Ahmad Elabbar.

22 January – Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine 2026

Dora Vargha (University of Exeter and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Communist M*A*S*H: life, death and politics at a Hungarian field hospital in North Korea

With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, bringing together most of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and China, a loosely coordinated medical aid to North Korea laid foundations for a new cooperation for countries that found themselves outside of the new, liberal international order. Medical missions physically connected newly established socialist worlds as doctors, nurses and technicians travelled 15,000 km over land, air and sea, through Moscow and Beijing; established close professional and personal relationships with other eastern Europeans on site, with Korean, Chinese and Russian colleagues; and engaged in a common, revolutionary world-making through shared experiences of shortages and ideas of fraternity. Based on extensive research on the Hungarian mission to North Korea between 1950 and 1957, through the everyday life of the field hospital this paper considers complex relationships between war and health, the challenges hospitals face in war zones, and the mobilisation of ideologies and geopolitics in the justification of conflict – and networks of solidarity.

29 January

HPS PhD Students' Showcase
Featuring: Tvrtko Vrdoljak, John Schaefer, Charlotte Stobart, Solomon Hajramezan, Scott Partington, Johanna Silva-Stüger, Jason Guo and Jules Macome 

5 February

Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology)
The secret causes of the Castle Bravo accident

The Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test, in March 1954, was the worst radiological accident of the United States nuclear testing program, contaminating tens of thousands of square miles of the territory of the Marshall Islands, including several inhabited atolls, and exposing nearby Marshallese, American observers, and the crew of a Japanese fishing boat to harmful levels of radioactive fallout. Despite being a fixture of both popular and scholarly interest for the past 70 years, the underlying cause of the accident has only very recently been understood. The official explanations – that a change in wind conditions, coupled with an unexpectedly high-yield – are now known to have been incorrect and even deliberately misleading. Documents and reports declassified and released in the last decade or so in fact point to an entirely different cause of the accident: a fundamentally flawed and unsubstantiated theory of how fallout would form for megaton-range weapons. In this talk, I will focus on 'what went wrong' in the Bravo accident, what impact different causative mechanisms do to our historical (and possibly legal) narratives about the accident, and, ultimately, the practices of Cold War knowledge production that were arguably the ultimate 'cause' of the accident.

12 February

Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge)
Permission to know

In this talk I will argue for what I call the 'Permission View' of knowledge. According to the Permission View we need others' permission in order to know: social permission is partially constitutive of knowledge. Whilst work from various sources outside analytic epistemology speaks in favour of this view, in this talk I argue for it on the basis of a set of pressures which arise from within accounts of knowledge offered by analytic epistemology. Focusing in particular on the discussion of pragmatic encroachment, and knowledge norms of assertion and action, I argue that we see the analytic epistemologist fire-fighting against a set of difficulties which can be better accommodated by giving up the individualism of standard analyses of knowledge in favour of the more radically social approach offered by the Permission View. I then go on to explore and defend some of the controversial implications of the view.

19 February

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Columbia University)
Chronic nation: the politics of experts, health and making modern Indian citizens (1940–70s)

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan's talk will trace debates about chronic diseases and questions of modernization in post-colonial India. She will explore the politics of experts and expertise, and how questions of immunity, the risks of stress and adaptability to modernization became significant, and new medical specializations and knowledge emerged and were recast in India in the context of work, lifestyles, and local metabolisms.

26 February

Stephan Guttinger (University of Exeter)
AI, automation, and the problem of error in science

Science is rapidly moving towards a more automated future. Whilst this is not an entirely new phenomenon – automation in science has been around for at least 150 years – recent years have seen an increase in talk about, and implementation of, automated workflows. This drive for more automation is particularly prominent in laboratory-based disciplines such as material sciences, chemistry, and the life sciences. The core aims that drive this push for more automation in the laboratory are 1) to increase research efficiency and 2) to improve the replicability of experimental outputs. In this talk I will analyse how these two aims are affected by the adoption of powerful new AI tools in science, with a focus on the life sciences. I will argue that whilst new AI capabilities, in particular the 'reasoning' abilities of large language models (LLMs), have the potential to boost the efficiency of research, they could have a negative effect on the replicability of scientific results. More specifically, I will argue that AI-driven automation (ADA) can reduce scientists' ability to troubleshoot the experimental process by diminishing their ability to identify, understand, and correct flawed research outputs. Two key implications of this analysis are 1) that the move from traditional automation to ADA needs to be managed in a context-sensitive manner which ensures that a laboratory's ability to deal with experimental error remains intact, and 2) that we need to develop a better understanding of error (and error-reasoning) in science in order to tackle implication 1).

5 March

Eric Winsberg (University of Cambridge & University of South Florida)
So friggin' likely: a public choice analysis of bureaucratic science

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis have fundamentally challenged the traditional 'credit economy' model of science, revealing an institutional architecture driven less by disinterested truth-seeking and more by bureaucratic survival. This talk outlines a Public Choice Philosophy of Science (PCPS) – a framework that models scientific institutions and their 'scientist-bureaucrats' as rational actors responding to incentives for political influence, resource protection, and moral signalling.

12 March

Paul E. Griffiths (University of Sydney & Macquarie University)
Sex as a process

Biological sex is not determined at conception. This fact has been obscured by concentrating on humans and ignoring the many species in which individuals change sex during their life cycle, as well as the many species with non-genetic or facultatively genetic sex determination systems. In these species it is self-evident that sex is the outcome of a developmental process, a process that can take different paths in different circumstances. But the general point applies equally to humans. Human sex chromosomes cause sexual development to proceed down a particular pathway (other things being equal), but they do not constitute sex any more than nest temperature constitutes sex in crocodiles. In humans, just as in species with non-genetic sex determination, assigning sex to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves 'prospective narration' – classifying the present in terms of its predicted future. Sex is a process.

As a corollary to this view, the idea that an individual organism is male, female, hermaphrodite or neuter should be replaced by the more accurate idea that organisms have state-dependent sexual life-history strategies under which individuals manifest one or more sexes during specific life-history stages and depending on circumstances. This is the only view that can be consistently applied across the whole diversity of sexual species.

The paper concludes by comparing and contrasting this processual view of biological sex with other recent 'sex realist' theories in philosophy of biology.

 

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene (climate histories) seminar offers sessions in the related fields of climate history and Anthropocene studies. Meetings are held on Thursdays at 1pm–2pm in Seminar Room 2. All are welcome!

Organised by Fiona Amery, Richard Staley and Amelia Urry.

29 January

George Adamson (King's College London)
'But they hardly ever freeze now': exploring weather-heritage, memory, and change in southeastern England

The concept of 'weather-heritage' suggests that weather is so central to everyday life that it should be considered a form of intangible cultural heritage, and protected through this lens. Weather contributes to sense of place, and it is through perceived changes to normal weather that people experience atmospheric changes caused by greenhouse gas emissions. This study – a collaboration between the Department of Geography and Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King's College London – explores the concept of weather-heritage though the weather memories of mainly older people in southeast England, collected through life history interviews and weather memories uploaded to an online portal. We show how participants build their sense of weather heritage through a combination of their own memories, weather norms such as seasonal patterns, and personal and cultural memories of notable events in the past such as the warm summer of 1976. Whilst our participants were wary of generalisations, many felt that recent changes in what they considered to be normal weather conditions were eroding sense of place, and in some cases, sense of Englishness. We therefore demonstrate the potential of weather-heritage as an entry point to alternative productive engagements with climate change.

12 February

Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan (Yale University)
The physics of entropy and the politics of waste in the 1970s

As debates over 'energy' swelled in the United States during the 1970s, 'entropy' entered the dialogue with it. This nineteenth-century concept from physics, that systems tend towards disorder, had a new lease on life. Physicists sought to use entropy as the basis for new efficiency measures amidst the oil crisis, economists deployed it to put a price on nature, policy advisors learned of thermodynamics for the first time, and popular books hit the press expounding on entropy as a 'new world view'. Social decay and ecological decay were thermodynamic decay, these thinkers argued, as they sought to make commensurable a plurality of midcentury crises – increasing pollution, growing income inequality, stagnating economic growth, and resource limits – through the science of heat. This talk tells the history of these thinkers to show how their use of entropy structured the way many social scientists and politicians came to understand waste. Eschewing theories of pollution or toxicity, these thermodynamic theorists defined waste as disorder or, in the language of physics, that which could not do work. As politicians adopted this framework into their policy measures, entropic waste circumscribed the bounds of energy conservation dialogue and directed debates away from the multitude of material wastes proliferating through the environment.

26 February

Michael Malay (University of Bristol)
Kite-flying in the Anthropocene

This paper is about kites – the craft of kite-making, the joy of kite-flying, and the ways in which kites can attune us to the world and its weathers. It's also about the relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' understandings of the weather – that is, how we experience the weather in our bodies and what we know of the weather through science – and the capacity of kite-flying to trouble these distinctions in surprising ways. It might be said that meteorology supplies us with 'facts' about the weather, whereas kite-flying offers us a phenomenology of the weather, but is it that simple? And mightn't phenomenology be part of a 'climate science', broadly conceived, even as it diverges from meteorology in crucial respects? This paper will also explore the work of Jorie Graham, particularly her poem 'Sea Change', to think about the role of the body in knowing – as well as failing to come to grips with – a world of changing weather.

5 March

Anna Schrade (Kwansei Gakuin University)
'Give Us Our Blue Skies Back!' Women, science, and environmental justice in Japan's Early Anthropocene (1950–1969)

This paper revisits one of the most extraordinary yet understudied episodes in Japan's environmental history: the Give Us Our Blue Skies Back movement, led by nearly 7,000 housewives in Tobata (Kitakyūshū) between 1950 and 1969. Situated at the heart of Japan's post-war industrial expansion, these women confronted the devastating effects of air pollution emitted by the Yahata Steelworks – then one of Japan's largest companies and a national symbol of economic recovery and technological progress. Without formal education or political experience, they organised one of Japan's earliest and longest-running anti-pollution movements, combining grassroots mobilisation, scientific inquiry, and moral persuasion to demand accountability from industry and government alike.

Their activism was remarkable not only for its scale but also for its epistemic innovation. From the very outset in 1950, the women independently generated empirical data on pollution's impact on human health and the natural environment, later collaborating with sympathetic scientists and physicians to produce knowledge that challenged corporate and state narratives of industrial inevitability. Their successes were unprecedented: they signed Japan's first Pollution Control Agreement in 1964 (a milestone that has been almost entirely overlooked in post-war Japanese history), produced a documentary broadcast nationwide on NHK in 1965, and by 1969 had initiated a region-wide commitment to pollution control.

Drawing on oral histories and local archives, this research situates the Give Us Our Blue Skies Back movement within the temporal and spatial margins of Japan's so-called 'miracle growth'. It reveals how ordinary women in the industrial periphery developed forms of civic cooperation and scientific engagement that both prefigured and transcended later environmentalism. It reconsiders prevailing narratives of Japan's environmental history by shifting the analytical lens from men to women, from highly educated elites to grassroots actors, from the political centre to the periphery, and from the conventional focus on the 1970s and 1980s to the formative activism of the 1950s and 1960s.

By foregrounding these women's collective labour, this paper reframes the Anthropocene not as a universal human condition but as a differentiated historical experience, unevenly distributed across gender, class, and geography. I will argue that the activism of Tobata's women constitutes an early form of Anthropocene agency – an assertion of environmental justice, epistemic authority, and democratic participation from below. Their story invites us to reconsider the origins of ecological consciousness and the place of citizen science in negotiating life within industrial modernity.

 

Coffee with Scientists

The aim of this group is to explore and enhance the interface between HPS and science. Although many of us in HPS engage closely with scientists and their practices, we could benefit from more explicit discussions about the relationship between HPS and science itself, and from more opportunities for HPS-scholars and scientists to help each other's work.

We meet on Fridays in the Board Room. Further information, any reading materials, and links for online meetings will be distributed through the email list of the group. Please contact Hasok Chang or Marta Halina if you would like to be included on the list.

30 January, 11.00am–12.30pm

Jonah Messinger (Winton Scholar and PhD student in the Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics)
The controversy over cold fusion

13 March, 11.00am–12.30pm

Steven Wooding (Head of Research on Research, Research Strategy Office)
Research on research

 

Cabinet of Natural History

This research seminar is concerned with all aspects of the history of natural history and the field and environmental sciences. The regular programme of papers and discussions takes place over lunch on Mondays. In addition, the Cabinet organises a beginning-of-year fungus hunt and occasional expeditions to sites of historical and natural historical interest, and holds an end-of-year garden party.

Seminars are held on Mondays at 1pm in Seminar Room 1.

For further details about upcoming events, or to be added to the mailing list for the Cabinet of Natural History, please contact Melissa Altinsoy or John Schaefer.

26 January

Sandra Liwanowska (HPS, Cambridge) 
Tall ambitions: giants and the pursuit of human improvement in the long eighteenth century

In the 1960s, Percy G. Adams asked why, in the so-called Age of Reason, belief in giants remained so widespread. Scholarship has often situated giants within curiosity culture, treating them as natural anomalies, 'jokes of nature', or relics of legendary ancestors. Yet in the long eighteenth century, giants stood apart from other monstrous figures. This talk argues that, amid fears of degeneration and new interests in heredity, selective breeding, and human improvement, exceptional height came to be valorised as a desirable trait rather than merely displayed as a fairground spectacle. Giants were reimagined as embodiments of Enlightenment ambitions to transcend physical limits in pursuit of an ideal 'tall' form. I will trace ideas of a 'race' of giants, the framing of human gigantism as attainable potential, and scientific efforts to explain abnormal height, before examining its valorisation in Frederick William I's Potsdam Giants, where exceptional stature became a symbol of military strength, civic virtue, and national identity.

2 February

Eszter Csillag (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Representing the tropical 'hortus': natural knowledge in Michael Boym's Flora Sinensis (1656)

The Polish Jesuit missionary Michael Boym (1612–1659) wrote some of the earliest European studies on China's natural history. His seminal work, Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), is not merely a botanical catalogue but a complex representation of China as a land of unparalleled fertility. While Boym's text promotes Chinese cultivation techniques and exotic flora, its hand coloured print images particularly emphasize plants from the southern, tropical regions of China.

This lecture argues that these tropical zones functioned in the European imagination as a kind of pseudo-greenhouse – a naturally abundant space where desirable fruits and spices flourished without need for intervention. Through an analysis of Flora Sinensis, I demonstrate how Boym's project was shaped less by a strict scientific survey of native botany and more by a logic of availability and fascination. His work represents a moment where empirical observation merged with the economic and cultural desire for the exotic.

Consequently, this study proposes a shift in how we read early modern botanical books: rather than categorizing them by their native origin, we should examine them as records of cross-cultural encounters, where visual representation was dictated by what was accessible, remarkable, and valuable to the observer. In Boym's case, the 'science' of flora is inseparable from the allure of the tropical.

9 February

Brad Scott (Queen Mary University of London)
Plant knowledge-making and the entanglements of natural things: investigations with Hans Sloane's herbarium

The herbarium accumulated by Hans Sloane (1660–1753) is the largest pre-Linnaean plant collection in the world. Comprising over 125,000 specimens, now bound in 272 volumes, its components were gathered and assembled by hundreds of individuals from many parts of the world. With such diverse sources, some dating from the early seventeenth century, Sloane’s collection is a valuable witness to the practices of herbarium construction and plant knowledge-making in this period.

In this presentation, Brad Scott presents the work he has recently undertaken during his PhD at Queen Mary University of London and the Natural History Museum. In it, he suggests how the herbarium as a technology was not simply a tool of knowledge production, but also of knowledge effacement. Such processes were evident during the assembly and management of the component collections by their various creators and owners, and in the curatorial history of the collection since Sloane's death. Furthermore, different ways of knowing and the social and economic infrastructures that supported herbarium construction are barely visible within the pages of plant collections. Through a series of short case studies, the presentation will explore how the practices of collection-building normalised the gaps and silences in herbaria, and thereby occluded certain categories of knowledge and the agency of many knowledge-holders.

23 February

Hilbrand Wouters (University of Konstanz)
The fisherman's catastrophe, the historian's problem: on historicizations of water bodies as Second Nature

Water makes a poor archive. Eddies whirl without leaving trace, tides erase footprints. The apparent immutability of large water bodies has long lured modern fishing societies into catastrophically volatile practices, and has likewise challenged historians studying past interactions of humans with marine ecologies – the historical record essentially lost at sea.

In this seminar, I discuss Arthur McEvoy’s 1986 The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and the Law in the California Fisheries 1850–1980, an account of a tragic boom and bust-cycle. Instead of simply chastising greed, McEvoy combined law, economic history, anthropology, and innovative ecological science to create a finer understanding of the knowledge and myths that (mis)guide fish-dependent communities.

Though hardly the first and certainly not flawless, McEvoy was relatively early in doing what many are still doing: combining historical methods with ecology to narrate complex human-environment interactions. Prompted by growing environmental awareness, recent scholarship has widely theorized on the methodological and narrative innovations required for historicizing such relations – through McEvoy, I sketch a modest prehistory of these continuing challenges.

2 March: Kew Gardens Panel

Emily Hughes and Sophia Kamps
Papers of natural history: publishing and archiving botany at Kew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Emily Hughes (UCL | Kew Gardens)
Despite vast research of the connection between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Empire, little attention has been turned towards the records kept of it. This paper links the fields of history of science and archival studies to introduce a new perspective: the necessity of considering organisational administrators such as recordkeepers as agents of power and knowledge production within the field of botanic history (Stoler 2002). Asserting natural knowledge as a tool and instrument of colonial control, the paper considers how the circulation of information and knowledge around the empire was dependent on bureaucratic efficiency and recordkeeping at Kew. It takes a material culture approach, assessing how the physical binding and organisation of records can reveal changing colonial priorities through the 19th century, how administrators viewed and categorised natural resources and the world, and how this impacts how archive-users interact with records at Kew today.

Sophia Kamps (Royal Holloway, University of London | Kew Gardens)
Lovell Reeve was the leading natural history publisher of the mid-Victorian era, responsible for periodicals such as Curtis's Botanical Magazine, publications for popular audiences, and specialist works of enduring significance. Lovell Reeve's publications are the result of a complex system of labour and market dynamics, with the publisher working to bring together illustrators, writers, and printers and produce volumes for both specialists and lay audiences. This paper brings together an analysis of the economics of publishing natural history based on the Lovell Reeve papers at RBG, Kew, with a material culture focus on book production, from the creation of elaborate hand-coloured lithographs to the innovative trade cloth bindings used for Reeve's Popular Natural History series. Through an emphasis on production process and materiality, this paper explores the tension between the book as a commodity, a scientific tool, and a work of art.

9 March

Kimberley Glassman (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Telling plant stories: agency of botanicals in Cambridge's collections

We often write histories from the perspective of humans and, as such, create connections through institutional collections from this purview. However, instead of creating links through people, what would happen if we initiated a search tethered to and centred around the plant? In this presentation, I situate the botanical species as the nucleic instigator of meaning-making within Cambridge's collections. From botanical art at the Fitzwilliam Museum to living and preserved specimens at the Cambridge Botanic Garden and Herbarium, I follow the story of one plant to exercise its agency within these collection networks: namely, the Amaryllis belladonna L.

16 March

Alice Wickenden (English, Cambridge)
Books and/of botany within Hans Sloane's library collection

In this talk I discuss the place of botany within Hans Sloane's library. Moving between horti sicci, print, and manuscript, I explore Sloane's presentation and storage of botanical collections within the library space and argue that the need to visually reproduce plants in printed books led to a triangulation of shared material: the original specimen, the engraved reproduction, and the attempt to identify or describe through language. I then move to a discussion of John Ray's Catalogus Plantarum Angliae et insularum adjacentium (1670; 1677), comparing the annotations across the eight copies (of two editions) owned by Sloane and arguing that the value in the duplication of books within Sloane's library was affected by the material existences of the individual copies. I conclude with a brief discussion of plant names in John Milton's Paradise Lost, showing how the library space as conceptualised through the discussion of Sloane can be extended metaphorically.

 

History of Medicine

Seminars are on Tuesdays from 5.00 to 6.30pm in Seminar Room 1. All welcome!

Early Science and Medicine

Organised by Philippa Carter and Emma Perkins.

27 January

Alexander Wragge-Morley (Lancaster University)
Habit, chronic disease and evolutionary theory, 1750–1830

3 February

Soile Ylivuori (University of Helsinki)
Experimenting on/with eels: colonial space and electric knowledge construction in the 18th century

10 March

Maria Florutau (Uppsala University)
Public instructions, colonial distances: prize questions in the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (c. 1770–1800)

History of Modern Medicine and Biology

Organised by Rosanna Dent, Nick Hopwood, Staffan Müller-Wille and Dmitriy Myelnikov.

10 February

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (University of Cambridge)
Mental healing and altered states in 20th-century China

17 February

Chidi Ugwu (University of Nigeria, Nsukka)
Strategic adaptation: Dibia and the negotiation of medical authority in eastern Nigeria

3 March

Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews) 
How to master a zoonotic pandemic: plague, rats and epidemiological reasoning

17 March

This seminar will exceptionally take place from 3.00 to 4.30pm

Jenny Reardon (UC Santa Cruz)
The birth of scientific anti-racism

Generation to Reproduction

Organised by Philippa Carter, Nick Hopwood, Rosanna Dent, Staffan Müller-Wille and Dmitriy Myelnikov.

24 February

Meleisa Ono-George (University of Oxford)
Visualizing difference: Amelia Newsham, John Hunter, and the refinement of racial knowledge

 

CamPoS (Philosophy of Science)

CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) is a network of academics and students working in the philosophy of science in various parts of the University of Cambridge, including the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Faculty of Philosophy. The Wednesday afternoon seminar series features current research by CamPoS members as well as visitors to Cambridge and scholars based in nearby institutions.

Seminars are held on Wednesdays, 1.00–2.30pm in Seminar Room 2. Organised by Matt Farr.

28 January

Miriam Solomon (Temple University)
The philosophical significance of pivotal cases

We are all familiar with 'paradigmatic' cases that anchor and communicate the core meanings of concepts. I would like to introduce the idea of 'pivotal cases', which are cases that lead to a change in the meaning of a concept. Such cases, which are often difficult at first and require creativity to resolve, shape the development of concepts and the direction of research in contingent ways. I will use examples from physics, medicine and psychiatry.

4 February

Ahmad Elabbar (HPS, Cambridge)
Trusting scientific advisors as epistemic curators: from error to attention

The literature on epistemic trust in science is flourishing. Despite its richness, however, work in this area remains 'error-centric': accounts of epistemic trust in science are motivated by the fallibility of scientific inquiry. In this talk, I argue that we need more expansive accounts of epistemic trust in science that shift away from a concern with the stakes of error towards attention. Building on a view of scientific advice as 'epistemic curation', and a case study ​on the stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet, I show that trusting scientific advisors in their full capacities as epistemic curators requires more than what error-centric accounts of trust can provide. In particular, it requires that we look beyond questions of reliability towards the distribution of attention.

11 February

Suilin Lavelle (University of Edinburgh)
The epistemic necessity of Majority World psychology

Psychologists based in Majority World countries (countries which hold the majority of the world's population) have long lamented Western biases in how cognition is studied. In this talk, I suggest that recent pluralist movements in philosophy of science have the potential to realise the diversity sought by these researchers. I will use a case study of Joint Attention in infancy to demonstrate how pluralism in how we operationalise psychological concepts brings forth new understanding of this phenomenon.

18 February

Miguel Ohnesorge (Boston University)
Lessons for human science measurement from the quantification of earthquake size

There are longstanding debates about whether the human sciences can quantify the attributes they study. We identify a basic problem within these debates: success standards and expectations are modelled almost exclusively on experimental physics. As a result, researchers in measurement theory, psychology, and philosophy, have (i) misidentified experimental control as a necessary condition for quantification and (ii) overlooked central methodological lessons on how quantification without experimental control might succeed. To remedy this situation, we present novel historical research on how twentieth-century seismologists quantified 'earthquake size'. The study serves to (i) refute the idea that experimental control is a necessary condition for quantification and (ii) provide an alternative methodology for quantifying without high degrees of experimental control. We contrast this methodology to an ongoing effort at quantifying reading comprehension to show that it helps us to better understand the achievements and persistent problems of quantification in the human sciences.
This is joint work with Cristian Larroulet Philippi (University of Melbourne).

4 March

Milena Ivanova (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge)
AI revolution! At whose cost? Towards environmental AI ethics

The environmental cost of AI is becoming progressively concerning with rocketing energy demands, mineral extraction and water demands. In this talk I draw lessons from ecofeminism to explore what values ought to shape our relationship with technology and the environment.

11 March

Book symposium on Matteo Vagelli's Reconsidering Historical Epistemology: French and Anglophone Styles in History and Philosophy of Science
Speakers: Matteo Vagelli (University of Venice); Nick Jardine (HPS, Cambridge); Cristina Chimisso (Open University)

18 March

Sebastian Rodriguez Duque (HPS, Cambridge)
'Measure once, cut twice': values and validity in youth mental health measurement

Psychometric validation can appear very specific and context sensitive. For the case of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), I argue that it falls short of securing the rigorous interpretation of scores, in part due to the different values of respondents and administrators in a new clinical context. I argue that validation practice is overly rigid. The lack of robust theories of constructs and response behaviour makes the standardized interpretation of scores unwarranted. Instead, attention to user values requires that validation practice remain dynamic, where the interpretation of scores must be collaborative. While some theories of psychometric validation attend to the ethics of measurement and the role of values, these are often addressed as bias. I discuss how values are an essential ingredient of validity evidence to secure the clinical interpretation of scores in the case of mental health. I substantiate my claims through my ongoing collaboration with a youth mental health service in British Columbia. There, the requirements of measurement-based care (MBC) and values like patient-centredness are in tension with the need to build and evaluate a learning health system and values like standardization. If the interpretation of scores can only be fixed in a clinical situation, it is not clear how such data can be collected and aggregated to support system level inferences. Different values must be traded off in a measurement practice, which in turn affects the quality of the inferences that different measurements may support for different purposes.

 

Philosophy of Experimentation Reading Group

This reading group explores philosophical topics related to scientific experimentation. We meet on Thursdays from 11am to 12noon in the Board Room. All welcome!

Organised by Niall Roe, Cameron Dashwood and Marta Halina.

Quarks: Evidence and Error

Last term, we focused on Hacking's notion of experimentation. Hacking was talking about electrons when he said, "if you can spray them, then they are real". But elections were sprayed with the aim of discovering quarks, this term's topic.

We begin our reading with a paper from Massimi, using quarks to critique Hacking's entity realism. This is followed by four papers on the history and philosophy of the experimental investigation of quarks, giving diverse perspectives on the topic. In the final paper we read last term, Hacking noted that "the repetition of [the quark] example is now becoming embarrassing". In hopes of avoiding embarrassment, our final three papers focus on the use of statistical methodology. Initially as it was used in discovering the top quark, but with an ultimate focus on the use of statistics in science of any type.

29 January

Massimi, Michela. 2004. 'Non-Defensible Middle Ground for Experimental Realism: Why We Are Justified to Believe in Colored Quarks'. Philosophy of Science 71 (1): 36–60.

5 February

Pickering, Andrew. 1981. 'The Hunting of the Quark'. Isis 72 (2).

12 February

Pickering, Andrew. 1999. 'Living in the Material World'. In The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, edited by David Gooding. Cambridge University Press.

19 February

Gooding, David. 2003. 'Putting Agency Back into Experiment'. In The Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation, by Hans Radder. University of Pittsburgh Press.

26 February

Staley, Kent W. 2002. 'What Experiment Did We Just Do? Counterfactual Error Statistics and Uncertainties about the Reference Class'. Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 279–99.

But see also:

5 March

Staley, Kent W. 2017b. 'Pragmatic Warrant for Frequentist Statistical Practice: The Case of High Energy Physics'. Synthese 194 (2): 355–76.

12 March

Mayo, Deborah G. 1997. 'Error Statistics and Learning From Error: Making a Virtue of Necessity'. Philosophy of Science 64 (S4): S195–212.

19 March

Mayo, Deborah G. 1996. 'The Experimental Basis from Which to Test Hypotheses: Brownian Motion'. Chapter 7 of Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge. Science and Its Conceptual Foundations. University of Chicago Press.

 

History of Science in Latin America Reading Group

During Lent 2026, we will continue exploring STS/HPS literature related to infrastructures in Latin America. We will meet in the Board Room on a biweekly basis on Thursdays at 1–2pm: 5 February, 19 February and 12 March.

For our first meeting, on 5 February, we will discuss:

 

Psy-Phi Reading Group

This reading group discusses current topics in philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. 

Meetings: Thursdays, 2–3pm in the Board Room
Organisers: Johanna Silva-Stüger, Robert Taylor and Scott Partington

29 January

Turner, J. (2025). 'What's Low Mood All About? An Indicative-Imperative Account of Low Mood's Content'. Philosophy of Science.

5 February

Pickard, H. (2024). 'Craving for drugs'. Mind & Language.

12 February

Patel, S. (2023). 'Between scientific and empathetic understanding: The case of auditory verbal hallucination'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

19 February

Kurth, C. (2025). 'Shames and Selves: On the Origins and Cognitive Foundations of a Moral Emotion'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

26 February

Gough, J. (2023). 'On the Proper Epistemology of the Mental for Psychiatry: What's the Point of Understanding and Explaining?'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

5 March

Schwarz, S. (2024). 'Problems and Prescriptions in Psychiatric Explanation'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

12 March

Constant, A. (2024). 'Personomics: Precision psychiatry done right'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

19 March

Marchionni, C. (2023). 'Challenging the Mechanistic View of Integration in Psychiatry'. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

 

Measurement Reading Group

We will meet fortnightly on Fridays, 11am–12noon in Seminar Room 1. Organised by Costanza Coloni and Niall Roe.

This term we will read chapters from the edited volume Wise, M. Norton (ed.), (1995). The Values of Precision, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

30 January

  • Introduction, pp. 3–13.
  • Golinski J., '"The Nicety of Experiment": Precision of Measurement and Precision of Reasoning in Late Eighteenth-Century Chemistry', pp. 72–92.

13 February

  • Olesko K.M., 'The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany', pp. 103–135. 

27 February – Discussion with the author, Simon Schaffer

  • Background reading: 'Electromagnetism: Ether and Field' (Chapter 5), in Hunt B., (2010). Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein, Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Schaffer S., 'Accurate Measurement is an English Science', pp. 135–175.
  • Optional: Wise M.N., 'Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement. Part II – The Age of Steam and Telegraphy', pp. 222–236.

13 March

  • Warwick A., 'The Laboratory of Theory or What's Exact about the Exact Sciences?', pp. 311–352.
  • Optional: Wise M. N., 'Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement. Part III – "Today Precision Must be Commonplace"', pp. 352–361.

 

Global HPS

This year we are turning our attention to methodology in HPS after the discipline's global turn, and building on the work of earlier groups: 'Decolonise HPS' (2019–23), 'Teaching Global HPSTM' (2023–24) and 'Teaching HPSTM Today' (2024–25). We will focus on different approaches to doing HPS, informed by intellectual lineages from different areas of the world.

All are welcome. Please contact Rosanna Dent or Lewis Bremner for more information.

Friday 6 February

From 2.00 to 3.30pm in the Board Room we will discuss two pieces of work with Chidi Ugwu and Mercedes Ejarque:

Friday 20 February

From 1.00 to 6.00pm we will attend the seminar that our three fellows are organising: 'Science, Technology and the Politics of Knowledge: Critical insights from the Global South' at CRASSH, SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road.

This research symposium will bring together Global South scholars, Cambridge researchers, and community voices from Nigeria, Argentina, India, and Malaysia to discuss scientific and (traditional) community based knowledge production and circulation in the Global South. The interdisciplinary forum will examine how postcolonial heritage, governance and institutions continues to affect countries in the Global South and how postcolonial epistemic dominance and mainstream Western knowledge are contested by local communities. It will also explore the links between scientific and technical knowledge production and public policy, and how researchers can help give voice to alternative ways of thinking and solutions which are rights-based and community based.

Friday 6 March

From 2.00 to 3.30pm we will have a session with Khetrimayum Monish.

Monday 16 March

Brendan Greeley (Princeton University)
Elephant and Castle: How the guinea became England's currency for risk

5.00 to 6.00pm in Seminar Room 2

In the space of two decades at the end of the 17th century, the guinea, a gold coin that sat outside of England's currency system of pounds, shillings and pence, became a currency for risk in England, spurring speculation in both gambling and financial markets. Traditional theories of England's financial revolution credit the development of institutions, such as Parliament's restraint of the Crown. But there's also a monetary explanation. Originally distributed as dividend payments to the investors in the Royal African Company, the guinea offered a new, distinct source of monetary gold that encouraged new forms of investment and financial speculation.

Brendan Greeley is a PhD candidate in financial history at Princeton University, and a contributing editor to The Financial Times. He was a financial journalist for two decades, covering economic and monetary policy as a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Financial Times, and The Economist. His work as a freelance writer has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal Europe. His book The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money will be published in the US by Penguin Random House in May 2026.

 

History and Philosophy of Physics Reading Group

We meet fortnightly on Mondays at 10am in the Board Room.

Organised by Hasok Chang, Neil Dewar and Richard Staley.

This term we discuss recent work or research in progress with different members of the reading group and community of historians and philosophers of physics in Cambridge, generally pairing current work with one other article or source.

All are welcome!

Given our discussion of unpublished work, please see below to sign up to participate and receive those papers not accessible through the Cambridge University Library. Papers will be distributed one week before the first meeting and two weeks before each subsequent meeting.

2 February

In this meeting we consider a recent manuscript on conventionalism from Neil Dewar.

16 February

In this meeting we consider Jaco de Swart's current work on neutrinos, particle dark matter, and cleaning a dark matter accelerator.

2 March

In this meeting we consider a chapter and article manuscript from Fiona Amery and Katy Duncan on the blurriness and uncertainties in atmospheric physics of the late nineteenth century – and also the blurry disciplinary boundary between physics and meteorology.

  • Fiona Amery, '"Calling forth an aurora": Atmospheric analogues and mimetic experimentation', unpublished ms. (2026).
  • Katy Duncan, '"The most difficult thing imaginable": William Thomson and the fair weather electricity problem', unpublished ms. (2026).

16 March

In this meeting we consider Daisuke Konagaya's recently published work on Yukawa Hideki's early work and the philosophical interests shaping his research.

 

Pragmatism Reading Group

The Pragmatism Reading Group is held on Mondays in the Board Room (usually at 11am, with exceptions marked below). Organiser: Niall Roe.

On Science and Natural Classes

This term's readings are wide ranging, grouped around understanding the roles and challenges of classification in pragmatist inquiry. 

The first four papers relate C.S. Peirce and Ian Hacking, touching on how to carve up a world in flux. We begin with Peirce's account of scientific classes and Hacking's looping effects. The third paper is historical, applying Hacking's notion to Peirce and Whewell. Cowels argues that their attempts to classify scientific methods changed the very subject they were trying to understand. The fourth paper, from Short, is a deeper look at Peirce's position on how stable kinds nevertheless emerge from the process.

The fifth paper returns to classical pragmatism with James' Sentiment of Rationality. He provides a general account of classification and uses it to critically assess the value of systematization itself. The next two papers discuss struggles to get at real kinds in physics and psychology. The final paper ties all this together. Stigler asks how methods from physics made their way into other fields. He comments on how this affected the kinds of objects each field could study, and uses Peirce's psychology experiment as his key example.

26 January – 11.30 in the Board Room

Peirce, C.S., 'On Science and Natural Classes'. Ch 9 in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2: 1893–1913, by Charles S. Peirce. Indiana University Press.

2 February

Hacking, Ian. 2007. Kinds of People: Moving Targets. British Academy.

9 February

Cowles, Henry M. 2016. 'The Age of Methods: William Whewell, Charles Peirce, and Scientific Kinds'. Isis 107 (4): 722–37.

16 February

Short, T.L. 1998. 'The Discovery of Scientific Aims and Methods'. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2): 293–312.

23 February – 11.00 in Seminar Room 1

James, William. 1879. 'The Sentiment of Rationality'. Mind 4 (15): 317–46

2 March

Chang, Hasok. 2001. 'Spirit, Air, and Quicksilver: The Search for the "Real" Scale of Temperature'. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 31 (2): 249–84.

9 March

Feest, Uljana. 2011. 'What Exactly Is Stabilized When Phenomena Are Stabilized?'. Synthese 182 (1): 57–71.

16 March

Stigler, Stephen M. 1992. 'A Historical View of Statistical Concepts in Psychology and Educational Research'. American Journal of Education 101 (1): 60–70.

 

Normative Theory and AI Research Group

The Normative Theory and AI Research Group is a seminar series exploring a wide range of normative issues in artificial intelligence.

We meet weekly 11.15–12.30pm on Tuesdays in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College.

For the first session in Lent Term, on Tuesday 3 February, Murray Shanahan (Imperial College) will introduce the topic of selfhood and AI.

The group is led by Claire Benn (CFI), Jessie Munton (Philosophy) and Tom McClelland (HPS). You can join our mailing list to get more information.

 

Cambridge Reading Group on Reproduction

Cambridge Reproduction invites all Cambridge researchers to attend a termly reading group to engage with classics and new work across disciplines – all with a central theme of reproduction.

See the Cambridge Reading Group on Reproduction page for more information and to sign up.

Tuesday 24 March, 12.30 to 2.30pm
Room CGO 9, Student Services Centre – Old Cavendish East Wing
Led by Dr Robert Pralat, Research Associate at THIS Institute

 

Calculating People

Calculating People is a reading group that examines contemporary social sciences with a special focus on their methodological controversies. All postgraduate researchers are welcome to join. Participants endeavour to read the articles ahead of time. The format is in-person.

The meetings take place on Tuesdays, 3–4pm in the Board Room. Organised by Anna Alexandrova.

27 January

Khalidi, Muhammad Ali. 'Transparency, Collective Intentionality, and Social Power: Commentary on Burman's Nonideal Social Ontology'. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 55, no. 6 (2025): 555–575.

10 February

Bryant, Amanda. 'Social Science and the Naturalization of Social Metaphysics: Old Biases and New Advances'. Journal of Social Ontology 11, no. 1 (2025): 193–219.

17 February

Elabbar, Ahmad (forthcoming). 'Values and Assessment Reports on Climate Change'. In Kevin C. Elliott & Ted Richards, Routledge Handbook of Values and Science.

24 February

Benjamin Schmidt. 'Two Volumes: The Lessons of Time on the Cross', chapter 9 of Computational Humanities (2024), Lauren Tilton, David Mimno, Jessica Marie Johnson (eds), University of Minnesota Press.

3 March

Jaeggi, Rahel (2025). 'Précis: Progress and Regression'. Analyse & Kritik 47 (2):237–252.

 

Values in Science Reading Group

We meet on Wednesdays at 11am in Seminar Room 1. Organised by Monte Cairns.

28 January

Wilholt, T. (2009). 'Bias and Values in Scientific Research'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 40(1), 92–101.

4 February

Miller, B. (2021). 'When is Scientific Dissent Epistemically Inappropriate?'. Philosophy of Science, 88(5), 918–928.

11 February

John, S. (2015). 'Inductive Risk and the Contexts of Communication'. Synthese, 192, 79–96.

18 February

Holman, B, & Geislar, S. (2018). 'Sex Drugs and Corporate Ventriloquism: How to Evaluate Science Policies Intended to Manage Industry-Funded Bias'. Philosophy of Science, 85(5), 869–881.

25 February

Wilholt, T. (2022). 'Epistemic Interests and the Objectivity of Inquiry'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 91, 86–93.

4 March

Junghans, T. (2022). 'The Limits of "The Limits of the Numerical": Rare Diseases and the Seductions of Qualification'. In The Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification, C. Newfield, A. Alexandrova, and S. John (Eds.), 93–115.

11 March

Draft from Ahmad Elabbar or Monte Cairns

18 March

Draft from Ahmad Elabbar or Monte Cairns

 

HPS Workshop

Fridays, 5–6pm in the Board Room
Organised by Solomon Hajramezan

The HPS Workshop seeks to break the isolation of postgraduate research and encourage collaborative thinking by allowing students to present works-in-progress in a supportive seminar environment. The workshops will have alternate sessions focusing on Philosophy and History, but interdisciplinary presentations are always welcome.

Students are invited to present on any aspect of their research that they are grappling with or desire feedback on, including:

  • Unpacking complicated sources, concepts, or archives
  • Presenting drafts of chapters, conference papers, or publications
  • Proposing new ideas or strategies towards HPS research


The session is composed of two parts: ~30 minutes where the speaker outlines their work (indicating areas that they would like feedback on) and ~30 minutes of discussion.

 

Postgraduate Seminars

Print & Material Sources

Tuesdays, 3.00–4.30pm

Cambridge holds some of the world's most important material sources for the history of science, and, in this seminar series organised by the Whipple Museum and Library, we'll explore them with the guidance of those who know them best.

 

Language Groups

Latin Therapy

Latin Therapy is an informal reading group. All levels of Latin are very welcome. We meet to translate and discuss a text from the history of science, technology or medicine. This is an opportunity to brush up your Latin by regular practice, and if a primary source is giving you grief, we'd love to help you make sense of it over tea and biscuits!

To be added to the mailing list, or to suggest a text, please contact Thomas Banbury or Debby Banham.

We meet weekly on Fridays, 4–5pm in the Board Room.

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